NVIDIA has released version 2.0.1 of GeForce Experience. This update does not bring many new features, hence why it is a third-level increment to the version number, but is probably worthwhile to download regardless. Its headlining feature is security enhancements with OpenSSL under remote GameStream on SHIELD. The update also claims to improve streaming quality and reduce audio latency.

While they do not seem to elaborate, I assume this is meant to fix Heartbleed, which is an exploit that allows an attacker to receive a small snapshot of active memory. If that is that case, it is unclear whether the SHIELD, the host PC during a game session, or both endpoints are affected.

NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce GTX TITAN Z at the GPU Technology Conference last month, and the cards will be for sale soon from various partners. ASUS will be one of the first AIB partners to offer a reference TITAN-Z.

The ASUS GTX TITAN Z pairs two full GK110-based GPUs with 12GB of GDDR5 memory. The graphics card houses a total of 5,760 CUDA cores, 480 texture manipulation units (TMUs), and 96 ROPs. Each GK110 GPU interfaces with 6GB of GDDR5 memory via a 384-bit bus. ASUS is using reference clockspeeds with this card, which means 705 MHz base and up to 876 MHz GPU Boost for the GPUs and 7.0 GHz for the memory.

For comparison, the dual-GPU TITAN Z is effectively two GTX TITAN Black cards on a single PCB. However, the TITAN Black runs at 889 MHz base and up to 980 MHz GPU Boost. A hybrid water cooling solution may have allowed NVIDIA to maintain the clockspeed advantage, but doing so would compromise the only advantage the TITAN Z has over using two (much cheaper) TITAN Blacks in a workstation or server: card density. A small hit in clockspeed will be a manageable sacrifice for the target market, I believe.

The ASUS GTX TITAN Z has a 375W TDP and is powered by two 8-pin PCI-E power connectors. The new flagship dual GPU NVIDIA card has an MSRP of $3,000 and should be available in early May.

As our readers are well aware, Mantle is available for use with a few games. Its compatibility begun with the beta Catalyst 14.1 driver and an update for Battlefield 4. AMD was quite upfront about the technology, even granting a brief interview with Guennadi Riguer, Chief Architect of the API to fill in a few of the gaps left from their various keynote speeches.

What is under lock and key, however, is the actual software development kit (SDK). AMD claimed that it was too immature for the public. It was developed in partnership with DICE, Oxide Games, and other, established developers to fine-tune its shape, all the while making it more robust. That's fine. They have a development plan. There is nothing wrong with that. Today, while the SDK is still not public and sealed by non-disclosure agreement, AMD is accepting applications from developers who are requesting to enter the program.

If you want to develop a Mantle application or game, follow the instructions at their website for AMD to consider you. They consider it stable, performant, and functional enough for "a broader audience in the developer community".

Congrats to our winner: Pierce H.! Check back soon for more contests and giveaways at PC Perspective!!

In these good old United States of America, April 15th is a trying day. Circled on most of our calendars is the final deadline for paying up your bounty to Uncle Sam so we can continue to have things like freeway systems and universal Internet access.

But EVGA is here for us! Courtesy of our long time sponsor you can win a post-Tax Day prize pack that includes both an EVGA Hadron Air mini-ITX chassis (reviewed by us here) as well as an EVGA GeForce GTX 750 graphics card.

With these components under your belt you are well down the road to PC gaming bliss, upgrading your existing PC or starting a new one in a form factor you might not have otherwise imagined.

Competing for these prizes is simple and open to anyone in the world, even if you don't suffer the same April 15th fear that we do. (I'm sure you have your own worries...)

Fill out the form at the bottom of this post to give us your name and email address, in addition to the reasons you love April 15th! (Seriously, we need some good ideas for next year to keep our heads up!) Also, this does not mean you should leave a standard comment on the post to enter, though you are welcome to do that too.

Wait patiently for April 30th when we will draw and update this news post with the winners name and tax documentation! (Okay, probably not that last part.)

A huge thanks goes out to friends and supporters at EVGA for providing us with the hardware to hand out to you all. If it weren't for sponsors like this PC Perspective just couldn't happen, so be sure to give them some thanks when you see them around the In-tar-webs!!

A bit of a surprise email found its way to my inbox today that announced NVIDIA's partnership with Ubisoft to include copies of the upcoming Watch_Dogs game with GeForce GTX graphics cards.

Gamers that purchase a GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GTX 780, GTX 770 or GTX 760 from select retailers will qualify for a free copy of the game. You can details on this bundle and available GPUs to take advantage of it at Amazon.com!

The press release also confirms inclusion of NVIDIA exclusive features like TXAA and HBAO+ in the game itself, which is interesting. From what I am hearing, Watch_Dogs is going to be a beast of a game on GPU hardware and we are looking forward to using it as a test platform going forward.

Full press release is included below.

OWN THE TECH AND CONTROL THE CITY WITH NVIDIA® AND UBISOFT®

Select GeForce GTX GPUs Now Include the Hottest Game of the Year: Watch_Dogs™

Santa Clara, CA —April 29, 2014— Destructoid calls it one of the “most wanted games of 2014.” CNET said it was “one of the most anticipated games in recent memory.” MTV said it’s one of the “Can’t-Miss Video Games of 2014.” This, all before anyone out there has even played it.

So, starting today(1), gamers who purchase select NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX® 780 Ti, 780, 770 and 760 desktop GPUs can get their chance to play Watch_Dogs™, the new PC game taking the world by storm and latest masterpiece from Ubisoft®.

Described as a “polished, refined and truly next generation experience,” in Watch_Dogs you play as Aiden Pearce, a brilliant hacker whose criminal past led to a violent family tragedy. While seeking justice, you will monitor and hack those around you, access omnipresent security cameras, download personal information to locate a target, control traffic lights and public transportation to stop the enemy and more.

Featuring NVIDIA TXAA and HBAO+ technology for an interactive, immersive experience, it’s clear that gamers can’t wait to play Watch_Dogs, especially considering the effusive praise that the official trailer received. Launched mere weeks ago, the trailer has already been viewed more than a combined 650,000 times. For gamers, Watch_Dogs seamlessly blends a mixture of single-player and multiplayer action in a way never before seen, and Ubisoft has gone one step further in creating a unique ctOS mobile companion app for users of smartphone and tablet devices allowing for even greater access to the fun. If you haven’t checked out the trailer, please check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eHCJ8pWdf0.

GPU drivers have been a hot and sensitive topic at the site, especially recently, probably spurred on by the announcements of Mantle and DirectX 12. These two announcements admit and illuminate (like a Christmas tree) the limitations of APIs on gaming performance. Both AMD and NVIDIA have their recent successes and failures on their respective fronts. This will not deal with that, though. This is a straight round-up of new GPUs running the latest drivers... in Linux.

In all, NVIDIA tends to have better performance with its 700-series parts than equivalently-priced R7 or R9 products from AMD, especially in low-performance Source Engine titles such as Team Fortress 2. Sure, even the R7 260X was almost at 120 FPS, but the R9 290 was neck-and-neck with the GeForce GTX 760. The GeForce GTX 770, about $50 cheaper than the R9 290, had a healthy 10% lead over it.

In Unigine Heaven, however, the AMD R9 290 passed the NVIDIA GTX 770 by a small margin, coming right in line with it's aforementioned $50-bigger price tag. In that situation, where performance became non-trivial, AMD caught up (but did not beat). Also, third-party driver support is more embraced by AMD than NVIDIA. On the other hand, NVIDIA's proprietary drivers are demonstrably better, even if you would argue that the specific cases are trivial because of overkill.

Update: As pointed out in the comments, some games perform significantly better on the $130 R7 260X than the $175 GTX 750 Ti (HL2: Lost Coast, TF2, OpenArena, Unigine Sanctuary). Some other games are the opposite, with the 750 Ti holding a sizable lead over the R7 260X (Unigine Heaven and Unvanquished). Again, Linux performance is a grab bag between vendors.

There's a lot of things to consider, especially if you are getting into Linux gaming. I expect that it will be a hot topic, soon, as it picks up... ... Steam.

AMD has been taking PC gaming very seriously, especially over the last couple of years. While they have a dominant presence in the console space, with only IBM in opposition, I believe that direct licensing revenue was not their main goal, rather that they hope to see benefits carry over to the PC and maybe mobile spaces, eventually. In the PC space, Never Settle launched as a very successful marketing campaign. While it had a stutter with the launch of the R9 (and R7) product lines, it is back and is still called, "Never Settle Forever".

Keeping with Forever's alteration to the Never Settle formula, the type of card that you purchase yields a Gold, Silver, or Bronze reward. Gold (the R9 280 and R9 290 series, and the R9 295X2) gets three free games in the Gold tier, Silver (R9 270 and R7 260 series) gets two in the Silver tier, and Bronze (R7 250 and R7 240 series) gets one free game in the Bronze tier. By and large, the tiers are the same as last time plus a few old games and one upcoming Square Enix release: Murdered: Soul Suspect. They have also made deals with certain independent developers, where two indie titles bundled together count as one choice.

The complete breakdown of games is as follows:

Gold

(Choose 3)

Silver

(Choose 2)

Bronze

(Choose 1)

Murdered: Soul Suspect (June 3, 2014)

Yes

Yes

No

Thief

Yes

Yes

No

Tomb Raider

Yes

Yes

No

Hitman: Absolution

Yes

Yes

No

Sleeping Dogs

Yes

Yes

No

Dungeon Siege III

Yes

Yes

Yes

Dirt 3

Yes

Yes

Yes

Alan Wake

Yes

Yes

Yes

Darksiders

Yes

Yes

Yes

Darksiders II

Yes

Yes

Yes

Company of Heroes 2

Yes

Yes

Yes

Total War: Shogun 2

Yes

Yes

Yes

Titan Quest (Gold Edition)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Supreme Commander (Gold Edition)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Yes

Yes

No

Payday 2

Yes

Yes

No

Just Cause 2

Yes

Yes

Yes

Banner Saga + Mutant Blobs Attack (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Guacamelee + DYAD (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Mutant Blobs Attack + DYAD (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Banner Saga + DYAD (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Mutant Blobs Attack + Guacamelee (indie combo)

Yes

Yes

Yes

Oddly enough, there does not seem to be a Banner Saga + Guacamelee combo...

... the only impossible combination.

AMD has also announced that Never Settle will continue for more "additions" in 2014. Which ones? Who knows. It is clear that they have a great working relationship with Square Enix Europe, including basically their last six major titles in Never Settle and keeping them there, but there is not really anything from them on the horizon (at least, not announced). AMD does sound confident in having other deals lined up this year, however.

There is some regional variance in game availability, however. Read up before you purchase (especially if you live in Japan). You should be fine if you live in North America, Europe, Middle East, Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and Latin America, though, at least where AMD products are available. Still, it is a good idea to check.

In the green trunks is the ASUS GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC which [H]ard|OCP overclocked to the point they saw in game performance of 1211MHz GPU and 7.2GHz on the memory. In the red trunks we find Gigabyte's R9 290X 4GB OC weighing in at 1115MHz and 5.08GHz for the GPU and memory respectively. Both cards have been pushed beyond the factory overclock that they came with and will fight head to head in such events as Battling the Field, Raiding the Tomb and counting to three twice, once in a Crysis and again in a Far Cry from safety. Who will triumph? Will the battle be one sided or will the contenders trade top spot depending on the challenge? Get the full coverage at [H]ard|OCP!

"Today we look at the GIGABYTE R9 290X 4GB OC and ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC video cards. Each of these video cards features a custom cooling system, and a factory overclock. We will push the overclock farther and put these two video cards head-to-head for a high-end performance comparison."

UPDATE: Our winners have been selected and notified! Thanks to everyone for participating and stayed tuned to pcper.com as we'll have more contests starting VERY SOON!!!

Our sponsors are the best, they really are. Case in point - Galaxy would like us to give away a pair of graphics cards to our fans. On the block for the contest are a Galaxy GTX 750 Ti GC and a Galaxy GTX 750 GC option, both based on the latest generation Maxwell GPU architecture from NVIDIA.

I posted a GTX 750 Ti Roundup story that looked at the Galaxy GTX 750 Ti GC option and it impressed in both stock performance and in the amount of overclocking headroom provided by the custom cooler.

How can you win these awesome prizes? Head over to our YouTube channel to find or just watch the video below! You need to be a subscriber to our YouTube channel as well as leave a comment on the video itself over on YouTube.

Anyone, any where in the world can win. We'll pick a winner on April 16th - good luck!

What NVIDIA did want to focus on with us was the significant improvements that have been made on the efficiency and performance of DirectX 11. When NVIDIA is questioned as to why they didn’t create their Mantle-like API if Microsoft was dragging its feet, they point to the vast improvements possible and made with existing APIs like DX11 and OpenGL. The idea is that rather than spend resources on creating a completely new API that needs to be integrated in a totally unique engine port (see Frostbite, CryEngine, etc.) NVIDIA has instead improved the performance, scaling, and predictability of DirectX 11.

NVIDIA claims that these fixes are not game specific and will improve performance and efficiency for a lot of GeForce users. Even if that is the case, we will only really see these improvements surface in titles that have addressable CPU limits or very low end hardware, similar to how Mantle works today.

To be clear, I am planning to look at several more games and card configurations next week, but I thought it was worth sharing our first set of results. The test bed in use is the same as our standard GPU reviews.

Test System Setup

CPU

Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E

Motherboard

ASUS P9X79 Deluxe

Memory

Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 16GB

Hard Drive

OCZ Agility 4 256GB SSD

Sound Card

On-board

Graphics Card

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 2GB

Graphics Drivers

NVIDIA: 335.23 WHQL, 337.50 Beta

Power Supply

Corsair AX1200i

Operating System

Windows 8 Pro x64

The most interesting claims from NVIDIA were spikes as high as 70%+ in Total War: Rome II, so I decided to start there.

First up, let's take a look at the GTX 780 Ti SLI results, the flagship gaming card from NVIDIA.

With this title, running at the Extreme preset, jumps from an average frame rate of 59 FPS to 88 FPS, an increase of 48%! Frame rate variance does increase a bit with the faster average frame rate but it stays within limits of smoothness, but barely.

Next up, the GeForce GTX 770 SLI results.

Results here are even more impressive as the pair of GeForce GTX 770 cards running in SLI jump from 29.5 average FPS to 51 FPS, an increase of 72%!! Even better, this occurs without any kind of frame rate variance increase and in fact, the blue line of the 337.50 driver is actually performing better in that perspective.

All of these tests were run with the latest patch on Total War: Rome II and I did specifically ask NVIDIA if there were any differences in the SLI profiles between these two drivers for this game. I was told absolutely not - this just happens to be the poster child example of changes NVIDIA has made with this DX11 efficiency push.

Of course, not all games are going to see performance improvements like this, or even improvements that are measurable at all. Just as we have seen with other driver enhancements over the years, different hardware configurations, image quality settings and even scenes used to test each game will shift the deltas considerably. I can tell you already that based on some results I have (but am holding for my story next week) performance improvements in other games are ranging from <5% up to 35%+. While those aren't reaching the 72% level we saw in Total War: Rome II above, these kinds of experience changes with driver updates are impressive to see.

Even though we are likely looking at the "best case" for NVIDIA's 337.50 driver changes with the Rome II results here, clearly there is merit behind what the company is pushing. We'll have more results next week!

If you wondered where the custom cooler for the impressively powerful AMD Radeon R9 295X2 came from then wonder no more. The cooler was designed specifically for this card by Asetek, a veteran in cooling computer components with water. You should keep that in mind the next time you think about picking up a third party watercooler!

Asetek, the world’s leading supplier of computer liquid cooling solutions, today announced that its liquid cooling technology will be used to cool AMD’s latest flagship graphics card. The new AMD Radeon R9 295X2 is the world’s fastest graphics card. Boasting 8 gigabytes of memory and over 11 teraflops of computing power, the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card is the undisputed graphics performance champion.

“Today’s high-end graphic cards pack insane amounts of power into a very small area and removing that heat is no small task. Utilizing our liquid cooling for graphics cards unlocks new opportunities for performance and low noise,” said André Sloth Eriksen, Founder and CEO of Asetek. “The fact that AMD has chosen Asetek liquid cooling for their reference cooling design is a testament to the reliability and performance of our technology.”

The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 is the first graphics card reference design ever to ship with an advanced closed-loop water cooling system. The Asetek-developed liquid cooling system on the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card delivers significant benefits for the performance-hungry enthusiast, hardcore gamer or Bitcoin miner. Users will appreciate the unobtrusive noise, low GPU and component temperatures, and blistering performance - right out of the box.

“As the most powerful graphics card offered to date, we knew we needed an outstanding custom cooling solution for the AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card,” said Matt Skynner, corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit, AMD. “Asetek’s liquid cooling embodies the efficient performance, reliability and reputation we were seeking in a partner. As GPUs become more powerful, the benefits of collaborating with Asetek and integrating our world-class technologies are clear.”

The AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card utilizes Asetek’s proven, maintenance free, factory sealed liquid cooling technology to cool the two powerful GPUs. This liquid cooling design ensures continuous stability even under full load. The card is easy to install and fits in most computer cases on the market today. With more than 1.5 million units in the field today, Asetek liquid cooling provides worry free operation to gamers and PC enthusiasts alike.

NVIDIA's GeForce 337.50 Driver was said to address performance when running DirectX 11-based software. Now that it is out, multiple sources are claiming the vendor-supplied benchmarks are exaggerated or simply untrue.

Going alphabetically, Anandtech tested the R337.50 and R331.xx drivers with a GeForce GTX 780 Ti, finding a double-digit increase with BioShock: Infinite and Metro: Last Light and basically zero improvement for GRID 2, Rome II, Crysis: Warhead, Crysis 3, and Company of Heroes 2. Adding a second GTX 780 Ti into the mix helped matters, seeing a 76% increase in Rome II and about 9% in most of the other titles.

BlackHoleTec is next. Testing the mid-range, but overclocked GeForce 760 between R337.50 and R335.23 drivers, they found slight improvements (1-3 FPS), except for Battlefield 4 and Skyrim (the latter is not DX11 to be fair) which noticed a slight reduction in performance (about 1 FPS).

ExtremeTech, finally, published one benchmark but it did not compare between drivers. All it really shows is CPU scaling in AMD GPUs.

Unfortunately, I do not have any benchmarks to present of my own because I am not a GPU reviewer nor do I have a GPU testbed. Ironically, the launch of the Radeon R9 295 X2 video card might have lessened that number of benchmarks available for NVIDIA's driver, who knows?

If it is true, and R337.50 does basically nothing in a setup with one GPU, I am not exactly sure what NVIDIA was hoping to accomplish. Of course someone was going to test it and publish their results. The point of the driver update was apparently to show how having a close relationship with Microsoft can lead you to better PC gaming products now and in the future. That can really only be the story if you have something to show. Now, at least I expect, we will probably see more positive commentary about Mantle - at least when people are not talking about DirectX 12.

If you own a GeForce card, I would still install the new driver though, especially if you have an SLi configuration. Scaling to a second GPU does see measurable improvements with Release 337.50. Even for a single-card configuration, it certainly should not hurt anything.

When Adobe started to GPU-accelerate their applications beyond OpenGL, it started with NVIDIA and its CUDA platform. After some period of time, they started to integrate OpenCL support and bring AMD into the fold. At first, it was limited to a couple of Apple laptops but has since expanded to include several GPUs on both OSX and Windows. Since then, Adobe switched to a subscription-based release system and has published updates on a more rapid schedule. The next update of Adobe Premiere Pro CC will bring OpenCL to Intel Iris Pro iGPUs.

Of course, they specifically mentioned Adobe Premiere Pro CC which suggests that Photoshop CC users might be coming later. The press release does suggest that the update will affect both Mac and Windows versions of Adobe Premiere Pro CC, however, so at least platforms will not be divided. Well, that is, if you find a Windows machine with Iris Pro graphics. They do exist...

The familiar Twin Frozr IV cooler has been added to the R9 290X GPU on MSI's latest AMD graphics card. The R9 290X GAMING 4G sports 4GB of GDDR5 running at an even 5GHz and a GPU that has three separate top speeds depending on the profile you choose; 1040 MHz with OC Mode, 1030 MHz for Gaming Mode and 1000 MHz in Silent Mode. [H]ard|OCP also tried manually overclocking and ended up with a peak of 1130MHz GPU and 5.4GHz for the GDDR5, not a bad bump over the factory overclock. Check out the performance of the various speeds in their full review.

"On our test bench today is MSI's newest high-end GAMING series graphics cards in the form of the MSI Radeon R9 290X GAMING 4G video card. We will strap it to our test bench and compare it to the MSI GeForce GTX 780 Ti GAMING 3G card out-of-box and overclocked to determine which card provides the best gameplay experience."

We knew that NVIDIA had an impending driver update providing DirectX 11 performance improvements. Launched today, 337.50 still claims significant performance increases over the previous 335.23 version. What was a surprise is GeForce Experience 2.0. This version allows both ShadowPlay and GameStream to operate on notebooks. It also allows ShadowPlay to record, and apparently stream to Twitch, your Windows desktop (but not on notebooks). It also enables Battery Boost, discussed previously.

Personally, I find desktop streaming is the headlining feature, although I rarely use laptops (and much less for gaming). This is especially useful for OpenGL, games which run in windowed mode, and if you want to occasionally screencast without paying for Camtasia or tinkering with CamStudio. If I were to make a critique, and of course I will, I would like the option to select which monitor gets recorded. Its current behavior records the primary monitor as far as I can tell.

I should also mention that, in my testing, "shadow recording" is not supported when not recording a fullscreen game. I'm guessing that NVIDIA believes their users would prefer to not record their desktops until manually started and likewise stopped. It seems like it had to have been a conscious decision. It does limit its usefulness in OpenGL or windowed games, however.

This driver also introduces GameStream for devices out of your home discussed in the SHIELD update.

This slide is SLi improvements, driver-to driver, for the GTX 770 and the 780 Ti.

As for the performance boost, NVIDIA claims up to 64% faster performance in configurations with one active GPU and up to 71% faster in SLI. It will obviously vary on a game-by-game and GPU-by-GPU basis. I do not have any benchmarks, besides a few examples provided by NVIDIA, to share. That said, it is a free driver. If you have a GeForce GPU, download it. It does complicate matters if you are deciding between AMD and NVIDIA, however.

NVIDIA launched a new visual computing appliance called the Iray VCA at the GPU Technology Conference last week. This new piece of enterprise hardware uses full GK 110 graphics cards to accelerate the company’s Iray renderer which is used to create photo realistic models in various design programs.

The Iray VCA specifically is a licensed appliance (hardware + software) that combines NVIDIA hardware and software. On the hardware side of things, the Iray VCA is powered by eight graphics cards, dual processors (unspecified but likely Intel Xeons based on usage in last year’s GRID VCA), 256GB of system RAM, and a 2TB SSD. Networking hardware includes two 10GbE NICs, two 1GbE NICs, and one Infiniband connection. In total, the Iray VCA features 20 CPU cores and 23,040 CUDA cores. The GPUs used are based on the full GK110 die and are paired with 12GB of memory each.

Even better, it is a scalable solution such that companies can add additional Iray VCAs to the network. The appliances reportedly transparently accelerate the Iray accelerated renders done on designer’s workstations. NVIDIA reports that an Iray VCA is approximately 60-times faster than a Quadro K5000-powered workstation. Further, according to NVIDIA, 19 Iray VCAs working together amounts to 1 PetaFLOP of compute performance which is enough to render photo realistic simulations using 1 billion rays with up to hundreds of thousands of bounces.

The Iray VCA enables some rather impressive real time renders of 3D models with realistic physical properties and lighting. The models are light simulations that use ray tracing, global illumination and other techniques to show photo realistic models using up to billions of rays of light. NVIDIA is positioning the Iray VCA as an alternative to physical prototyping, allowing designers to put together virtual prototypes that can be iterated and changed at significantly less cost and time.

Iray itself is NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated photo realistic renderer. The Iray technology is used in a number of design software packages. The Iray VCA is meant to further accelerate that Iray renderer by throwing massive amounts of parallel processing hardware at the resource intensive problem over the network (the Iray VCAs can be installed at a data center or kept on site). Initially the Iray VCA will support 3ds Max, Catia, Bunkspeed, and Maya, but NVIDIA is working on supporting all Iray accelerated software with the VCA hardware.

The virtual prototypes can be sliced and examined and can even be placed in real world environments by importing HDR photos. Jen-Hsun Huang demonstrated this by placing Honda’s vehicle model on the GTC stage (virtually).

In fact, one of NVIDIA’s initial partners with the Iray VCA is Honda. Honda is currently beta testing a cluster of 25 Iray VCAs to refine styling designs for cars and their interiors based on initial artistic work. Honda Research and Development System Engineer Daisuke Ide was quoted by NVIDIA as stating that “Our TOPS tool, which uses NVIDIA Iray on our NVIDIA GPU cluster, enables us to evaluate our original design data as if it were real. This allows us to explore more designs so we can create better designs faster and more affordably.”

The Iray VCA (PDF) will be available this summer for $50,000. The sticker price includes the hardware, Iray license, and the first year of updates and maintenance. This is far from consumer technology, but it is interesting technology that may be used in the design process of your next car or other major purchase.

What do you think about the Iray VCA and NVIDIA's licensed hardware model?

While Mantle and DirectX 12 are designed to reduce overhead and keep GPUs loaded, the conversation shifts when you are limited by shader throughput. Modern graphics processors are dominated by sometimes thousands of compute cores. Video drivers are complex packages of software. One of their many tasks is converting your scripts, known as shaders, into machine code for its hardware. If this machine code is efficient, it could mean drastically higher frame rates, especially at extreme resolutions and intense quality settings.

AMD's GCN architecture is actually quite interesting, especially dissected as it was in the presentation. It is simpler than its ancestors and much more CPU-like, with resources mapped to memory (and caches of said memory) rather than "slots" (although drivers and APIs often pretend those relics still exist) and with how vectors are mostly treated as collections of scalars, and so forth. Tricks which attempt to combine instructions together into vectors, such as using dot products, can just put irrelevant restrictions on the compiler and optimizer... as it breaks down those vector operations into those very same component-by-component ops that you thought you were avoiding.

Basically, and it makes sense coming from GDC, this talk rarely glosses over points. It goes over execution speed of one individual op compared to another, at various precisions, and which to avoid (protip: integer divide). Also, fused multiply-add is awesome.

I know I learned.

As a final note, this returns to the discussions we had prior to the launch of the next generation consoles. Developers are learning how to make their shader code much more efficient on GCN and that could easily translate to leading PC titles. Especially with DirectX 12 and Mantle, which lightens the CPU-based bottlenecks, learning how to do more work per FLOP addresses the other side. Everyone was looking at Mantle as AMD's play for success through harnessing console mindshare (and in terms of Intel vs AMD, it might help). But honestly, I believe that it will be trends like this presentation which prove more significant... even if behind-the-scenes. Of course developers were always having these discussions, but now console developers will probably be talking about only one architecture - that is a lot of people talking about very few things.

This is not really reducing overhead; this is teaching people how to do more work with less, especially in situations (high resolutions with complex shaders) where the GPU is most relevant.

The AMD FirePro W9100 has been announced, bringing the Hawaii architecture to non-gaming markets. First seen in the Radeon R9 series of graphics cards, it has the capacity for 5 TeraFLOPs of single-precision (32-bit) performance and 2 TeraFLOPs of double-precision (64-bit). The card also has 16GB of GDDR5 memory to support it. From the raw numbers, this is slightly more capacity than either the Titan Black or Quadro K6000 in all categories. It will also support six 4K monitors (or three at 60Hz), per card. AMD supports up to four W9100 cards in a single system.

Professional users can be looking for several things in their graphics cards: compute performance (either directly or through licensed software such as Photoshop, Premiere, Blender, Maya, and so forth), several high-resolution monitors (or digital signage units), and/or a lot of graphics performance. The W9100 is basically the top of the stack which covers all three of these requirements.

AMD also announced a system branding initiative called, "AMD FirePro Ultra Workstation". They currently have five launch partners, Supermicro, Boxx, Tarox, Silverdraft, and Versatile Distribution Services, which will have workstations available under this program. The list of components for a "Recommend" certification is: two eight-core 2.6 GHz CPUs, 32GB of RAM, four PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, a 1500W Platinum PSU, and a case with nine expansion slots (to allow four W9100 GPUs along with one SSD or SDI interface card).

Also, while the company has heavily discussed OpenCL in their slide deck, they have not mentioned specific versions. As such, I will assume that the FirePro W9100 supports OpenCL 1.2, like the R9-series, and not OpenCL 2.0 which was ratified back in November. This is still a higher conformance level than NVIDIA, which is at OpenCL 1.1.

The SHIELD from NVIDIA is getting a software update which advances GameStream, TegraZone, and the Android OS, itself, to KitKat. Personally, the GameStream enhancements seem most notable as it now allows users to access their home PC's gaming content outside of the home, as if it were a cloud server (but some other parts were interesting, too). Also, from now until the end of April, NVIDIA has temporarily cut the price down to $199.

Going into more detail: GameStream, now out of Beta, will stream games which are rendered on your gaming PC to your SHIELD. Typically, we have seen this through "cloud" services, such as OnLive and GaiKai, which allow access to a set of games that run on their servers (with varying license models). The fear with these services is the lack of ownership, but the advantage is that the slave device just needs enough power to decode an HD video stream.

In NVIDIA's case, the user owns both server (their standard NVIDIA-powered gaming PC, which can now be a laptop) and target device (the SHIELD). This technology was once limited to your own network (which definitely has its uses, especially for the SHIELD as a home theater device) but now can also be exposed over the internet. For this technology, NVIDIA recommends 5 megabit upload and download speeds - which is still a lot of upload bandwidth, even for 2014. In terms of performance, NVIDIA believes that it should live up to expectations set by their GRID. I do not have any experience with this, but others on the conference call took it as good news.

As for content, NVIDIA has expanded the number of supported titles to over a hundred, including new entries: Assassin's Creed IV, Batman: Arkham Origins, Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Daylight, Titanfall, and Dark Souls II. They also claim that users can add other apps which are not officially supported, Halo 2: Vista was mentioned as an example, for streaming. FPS and Bitrate can now be set by the user. A bluetooth mouse and keyboard can also be paired to SHIELD for that input type through GameStream.

Yeah, I don't like checkbox comparisons either. It's just a summary.

A new TegraZone was also briefly mentioned. Its main upgrade was apparently its library interface. There has also been a number of PC titles ported to Android recently, such as Mount and Blade: Warband.

The update is available now and the $199 promotion will last until the end of April.